This directory contains a simple Emacs Lisp tutorial, released under
GNUGPL,
presented in several
lessons. After going through the lessons, you should be familiar enough
with Emacs Lisp to read and write programs of moderate complexity,
and to continue your studies independently.

Before you get into this particular tutorial, check out the most excellent
Emacs-Lisp Intro by Robert J. Chassell. Recommended.

To follow along properly, you will need an Emacs running under a sane
operating system, such as GNU/Linux. If you are stuck under anything by
Microsoft, the tutorial is still workable, but will probably be less
fun. You must start Emacs by typing at a command prompt: "emacs -q" and
pressing Return (or Enter as you may see on your keyboard). This is
recommended over starting Emacs from a pull-down menu because
the "-q" option means "quick start"; the normal initializations that
take a long time are bypassed. This also helps us stay on the same
page, for some of these initializations may not be compatible with this
tutorial.

One exceptionally useful feature that "emacs -q" does not normally provide is
font-locking (also known as syntax highlighting). It is ok to enable this
feature (with command `M-x global-font-lock-mode'); the
tutorial does not make use of font-locking but by the same token is not harmed
by it.
[Update 2012-11-05: As of Emacs 22, font-locking is enabled by default,
so there is no need to manually enable it.]

Although the page you are reading is html, the body of the tutorial is
presented as heavily commented Emacs Lisp code. It is extremely
important that you save each lesson as a writeable file that is opened
from within Emacs by `M-x find-file'. Simply reading
the file may offer you some insight, but the whole point of the tutorial
is to viscerally interact with the Emacs Lisp programming environment (that
is, Emacs). Thus, the only way to proceed is to grab the gzipped
tarball (version 2.05)
and unpack it locally,
so that you can modify the files for maximal empirical benefit.